SHARP News
Volume 22 | Number 1
Article 1
Winter 2013
Volume 22, Number 1
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et al.: Volume 22, Number 1
SHARP News
Volume 22, Number 1
Exhibition Reviews
I Have Seen the Future: Norman
Bel Geddes Designs America
Harry Ransom Center
The University of Texas at Austin
11 September 2012 – 6 January 2013
Even if one is not familiar with Norman
Bel Geddes, his designs speak to the aesthetic
power of futuristic thinking. The Ransom
Center’s exhibition takes a panoramic view
of Geddes’ life and work, from his childhood to his work as a famed futurist and his
fluctuation between the roles of visionary and
pragmatist. The exhibition is accompanied by
a related book edited by Donald Albrecht,
curator of the exhibition.
Despite Geddes’ reputation as, perhaps,
America’s foremost futurist and industrial
designer, he almost entirely lacked formal
training. In an incident indicative of his aptitude for design, Geddes was expelled from
school in 1917 for drawing a caricature of a
teacher; he then began to design for the stage.
The exhibition has a brilliant display of the
variety and inventiveness of Geddes’ work,
which manages to seem modern even today.
Of especial interest are his vibrant costume
designs for The Miracle and the production
photographs, program, portion of the score,
and stage model documenting his work with
Eternal Road, a late 1930s play with fantastical
set design that caused astronomical production costs.
The next section on industrial design demonstrates how Geddes’ experience with stage
productions facilitated his design of department store displays. This endeavor marked
the beginning of Geddes’ work as a pioneer
of industrial design. The exhibition shows
how Geddes’ concomitant futuristic vision
and desire for practical design coalesced to
produce exciting concepts in home, military,
commercial, and infrastructure design. A
miniature model home, measuring about two
Published by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst, 2013
by two feet, displayed with related floor plans,
features a simple and “hygienic” plan focused
on efficiency, including a rotating garage floor
to facilitate ease of parking and exiting the
garage. Geddes’ metallic “Manhattan” cocktail
shaker and glasses – loaned from the Museum
of the City of New York – are especially
charming, since, as the walltext points out,
the crisp, tiered structure is suggestive of the
skyline of Manhattan.
The 1932 publication of Geddes’ book
Horizons cemented his reputation as a futurist. The Center has a first edition of the book
on display, along with newspaper articles
and a cartoon alluding to Geddes’ increased
notoriety. As Geddes’ reputation grew, so
too did the number of his commissions. His
design of the J. Walter Thompson advertising
agency’s offices catalyzed the commission of
numerous projects from the firm’s clients.
Most significantly, Shell Oil asked Geddes to
design their “City of Tomorrow” urban model
advertising campaign, which is documented in
the exhibition by the original advertisements.
The exhibition argues that the Shell campaign
served as a rehearsal for Geddes’ most famous
work, General Motor’s Futurama at the 1939
New York World’s Fair.
Before the sensation of Futurama, however, Geddes experienced varying degrees of
success. The Center has several car models
– ranging from a foot and a half long to eight
inches long by three inches wide – on display,
and they remain enchanting; other ideas, such
as a conception for a floating airport in the
middle of New York Harbor, immediately
appear ill-conceived. Geddes’ experience with
the 1933–1934 Century of Progress International Exhibition in Chicago is presented as
an emblematic example of his mixed success:
none of his innovations for the exhibition
were realized, and Geddes was removed from
the exhibition’s design board due to lobbying
by disgruntled Chicago architects, who disapproved of his lack of formal training.
Geddes’ fortunes changed when General
Motors asked him to create a futuristic urban
model for the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
Winter 2013
Thousands of viewers toured the exhibition,
and they were given buttons proclaiming, “I
have seen the future,” upon concluding their
tour. Photographs on display show delighted
viewers riding through the exhibition. Futurama was a sensation, and the exhibition’s rich
display of photographs, ephemera, and film
footage impresses the viewer with Futurama’s
grandeur, excitement, and success.
After Futurama, Geddes continued his
work with urban planning and commercial
design. He was appointed to work on preliminary planning for the National Motorway
Planning Authority, and his conceptual infrastructural planning made a decisive impact
on the eventual interstate highway system.
Geddes’ continued success at the Bel Geddes
Company, where he worked on urban design,
household goods, and top-secret military
projects, solidified his reputation as a luminary
and influential founder of industrial design.
This exhibition, along with its online
media components on the Ransom Center’s
website, <http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/2012/normanbelgeddes/>, and
its accompanying book, does justice to the
broad and distinguished career of a foremost
designer and futurist. Even visitors unacquainted with industrial design are sure to
enjoy the fantastical display and wide range
of objects on view.
Alison Clemens
University of Houston, Texas
Donald Albrecht, ed. Norman Bel Geddes Designs America. New York: Abrams, 2012. ISBN
9781419702990. 400p., ill. US $65 / CAN $75.
Contents
Exhibition Reviews
Call for Papers
Call for Nominations
Book Reviews
In Short
E-Resource Reviews
Bibliography
1
5
5
6
10
10
12
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SHARP News, Vol. 22, No. 1 [2013], Art. 1
c Winter 2013
SHARP News
Editor
Sydney Shep, Wai-te-ata Press
Victoria University of Wellington
PO Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand
[email protected]
Editorial Assistant - 22.1
Sara Bryan
Publication Assistant, Wai-te-ata Press
Review Editors
Fritz Levy, Books – Europe
University of Washington, WA, USA
[email protected]
Millie Jackson, Books – Americas
University of Alabama, AL, USA
[email protected]
Susann Liebich, Books –Australasia/Pacific
Victoria University of Wellington, NZ
[email protected]
Abhijit Gupta, Books – South Asia
Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India
[email protected]
Lisa Pon, Exhibitions
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, TX, USA
[email protected]
Katherine Harris, E-Resources
San Jose State University, CA, USA
[email protected]
Bibliographer
Meraud Ferguson Hand
Oxfordshire, UK
[email protected]
Subscriptions
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Journals Publishing Division
PO Box 19966, Baltimore,
MD 21211–0966
[email protected]
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SHARP News Vol. 22, no. 1
In Pursuit of a Vision: Two
Centuries of Collecting at the
American Antiquarian Society
The Grolier Club, New York City
12 September – 17 November 2012
Entering this bicentennial exhibition of
the Antiquarian Society of America (AAS),
one sees in the lower left-hand corner of the
first of the gallery’s ten display-window cases
a small handwritten book which emphasizes
from the very beginning what this exhibition,
and the AAS itself, have been about: it is
Isaiah Thomas’s catalog of his private library.
The Society’s goal was, and remains, to “pay a
debt we owe to our forefathers” by collecting,
cataloging, and preserving the written record
of our national past for future generations. Its
unequalled success in fulfilling that goal has
largely been due to the kindness of friends,
and sometimes strangers, whose two centuries of largess is the organizing principle
of this exhibition. Names of the donors of
all the items are listed on the accompanying
caption cards.
If the selection of books, manuscripts,
pamphlets, broadsides, ephemera, and artifacts does not afford a strictly chronological
review of the treasures of the AAS, it is
interesting to see how collecting changed
over the generations and how in some cases
(e.g., children’s literature) remained much the
same. Adjacent to the works and a miniature
portrait of Thomas are examples of works
of Richard Mather and Cotton Mather donated by Hannah Mather Crocker. The Rev.
William Bentley’s gift of his library of 4,000
volumes greatly increased the holdings of the
AAS. The Society’s early librarian Christopher
Columbus Baldwin is pictured in case two in
a miniature painted by Sarah Goodridge with
her characteristic flesh tones. Side by side
with Baldwin’s contributions, including his
nephew’s annotated Dibdin, An Abridgement
of Dibdin’s Classics to which are Added Useful
Notes and Remarks (ca. 1813), one sees from a
generation later the Public Laws of the Confederate States…(1864) and an Account Book of Slave
Auctions (Richmond, 1846–1849): two of the
many items relating to slavery and abolition
in the exhibition.
Space here precludes mentioning items
from all ten cases and a large vitrine, but a
few highlights are indicative of the collectors’ range of interests: the AAS itself of
course being omnivorous. A pristine copy of
Benjamin Franklin’s masterful 1744 printing
of James Logan’s translation of Cicero’s Cato
Major, or On Old Age, With Explanatory Notes
reflects a time when Franklin had hoped
Philadelphia would become the seat of the
American muses. In calling it the “first Translation of a Classic in this Western World,” he
may, in an early instance of senectus, himself
have forgotten that in 1735 he had published
Logan’s translation of the Distichs of Cato. A
copy of the first American Hebrew Grammar,
the Dickdook Leshon Gnebreet by Judah Monis
(1735) (Hebrew being required of incoming
Harvard students), John Smith Emerson’s O
ke kumumua nan a kamalii… (a 1837 Hawaiian
primer), and the Choctaw Holisso hushi holhtena
isht anoli: Chahta Almanac… (1836) are among
the fascinating foreign language works.
Children’s literature, of which there were
dozens of titles, is in part represented by
Thomas White’s A Little Book for Little Children
(1702), Mother Goose’s Melody, or Sonnets for the
Cradle (1794), and Mother Goose’s Quarto (ca.
1824), the latter being a hand-colored copy
and all being gifts of Charles Lemmuel Nichols. J.J. Jackson’s Nonsense for Girls (ca. 1874)
with its colorful caricatures of bobbleheadlike foolish girls is in excellent condition for
a MacLoughlin book. Harry, The Boy That Did
Not Own Himself (ca. 1863), an American Tract
Society “tale of a boy’s journey to manhood,
from his abduction by slave traders as a baby
to his escape to Canada as a young man,” is
one of more than 700 children’s titles acquired
through the Linda F. and Julian L. Lapides
endowment fund.
In addition to its wealth of monographs
and pamphlets, AAS has probably the strongest collection of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury American newspapers. Among these,
The St. George Juvenile (1868), an amateur
newspaper from the Mormon Territory, is
“a curious blend of poetry, maxims, and
advertisements.” Another, The Frontier Scout
in its complete run of 15 issues (1865–1866),
was printed in Fort Rice, a 500 square-foot
outpost in North Dakota. According to its
U.S. Army officer-editor, Capt. E.G. Adams,
the paper is “a living, speaking embodiment
of the society in which we dwell.” Stephen H.
Branch’s Alligator (1838) was a cross between
New York State political muck-raking and
proto-tabloid sensationalism. AAS also holds
a rare complete run of the Sandwich Island
Gazette and Journal of Commerce and, closer
to the mainland, The Royal Danish Gazette,
which was founded in 1770 in St. Croix and
published in English and Danish. The Rake, a
tame copy of which was on display, is one of
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SHARP News Vol. 22, no. 1
the many nineteenth-century X-rated newspapers, which, unlike many of the other AAS
newspapers, has not been digitized.
To return again to Isaiah Thomas, the AAS
contributions to bibliography began with his
checklist of pre-1776 imprints, which was not
published until 1874 in a version expanded
by Samuel Foster Havens, Jr. as a late supplement to The History of Printing in America.
AAS’s Clarence Brigham worked closely with
Charles Evans on the monumental American
Bibliography and in 1947 published his History and Bibliography of American Newspapers,
1690–1820. AAS librarian Clifford Shipton
not only competed and expanded Evans’s
work but through Readex Microprint managed to distribute more than 36,000 Evans
texts in its “Early American Imprints” project
on opaque 6x9” cards with 100 pages per
card to libraries around the country – however stillborn that 1940s technology appears
today as those AAS holdings migrate to the
digital world.
In this election year, it is perhaps a bit
surprising that there is so little of the political record, from the 1812 presidential contest
between James Madison and DeWitt Clinton
and onward, selected for display – the AAS
must be overflowing with it. A scholarly and
beautifully illustrated printed catalog, edited
principally by David R. Whitesell, is available
from AAS and from Oak Knoll Press.
August A. Imholtz, Jr.
Beltsville, MD
David R. Whitesell, ed. In Pursuit of a Vision: Two
Centuries of Collecting at the American Antiquarian
Society. Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian
Society, 2012. ISBN 9781929545698. 222p., US
$55 hardcover / US $35 paperback.
c
Crossing Borders: Manuscripts
from the Bodleian Libraries
The Jewish Museum, New York City
14 September 2012 – 3 February 2013
Upon entering Crossing Borders, visitors
step into a world of beauty and luxury filled
with what can rightly be called “treasures of
the Bodleian Library.” Each case contains
carefully selected pages of richly written,
illuminated, and decorated pages of Hebrew manuscripts of the medieval period.
From the very first step, we are confronted
by difference. Wall signage is right justified
Published by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst, 2013
Winter 2013 d throughout the exhibit, a subtle reminder
that Hebrew is the dominant language of
these precious manuscripts. Indeed, most
of the digitized texts, available for visitors
on embedded touch screens, scroll or swipe
from right to left. With zoom capability, these
digital surrogates encourage the viewer to
explore the nuances of the text, marginalia,
and decorative motifs, be they animals, floral
designs, or micrography.
The exhibit is divided into nine topics:
From Roll to Codex; Medieval Hebraism;
Islamic Decorative Motifs; Shared Motifs in
Christian and Hebrew Books; The Kennicott
Bible, a Medieval Masterpiece; Fables from India to Spain and Beyond; Christians, Muslims,
and Jews Copy Euclid; Collectors of Hebrew
Books; and Sir Thomas Bodley and Queen
Elizabeth I. The exhibit catalog contains
essays on the same general topics, complete
with illustrations of the pages showcased at
the museum. The online exhibit presents most
of the pages for further study complete with
captions and short essays about the subject.
In some cases, as with the Kennicott Bible,
the entire text is available online, at <http://
bodleian.thejewishmuseum.org>.
Materials gathered together from archaeological expeditions and finds at Oxyrhynchus,
the Cairo Genizah, Dead Sea Scrolls, and the
private purchases of Sir Thomas Bodley, book
collectors, and scholars, represent a small
sampling of the hundreds of Hebrew manuscripts held by the Bodleian. Curators Piet van
Boxet and Sabine Arndt for the Bodleian and
Claudia Nahson at the Jewish Museum, NYC,
facilitated by the Oxford Centre for Hebrew
and Jewish Studies at Yarnton, collected
singular and unusual examples to represent
the history of the Hebrew book through the
middle ages.
Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Greek and Syriac,
Judeo Arabic, and Ladino represent the
multi-lingual and multi-cultural nature of this
exhibit. Opening with a sixteenth-century
colored portolan chart of the Mediterranean,
the exhibit showcases a very few of the extant
Hebrew texts dating between the second and
ninth centuries CE, including Philo on papyrus from Oxyrhynchus and Hebrew liturgical
text in rotulus, or vertical book scroll, written
on two sides of the parchment, that dates to
the tenth century and that was found in the
Cairo Genizah.
Side by side, we see biblical texts and commentaries with parallel illustrations, Vulgate
Bibles, Hebrew Pentateuch, and Tanakh.
Commentaries of Maimonides (Rambam),
Nachmanides (Ramban), and Gersonides
(RaLBaG) share space with Rashi. Visitors
will gaze at a find from the Cairo Genizah
of Maimonides’ Mishna commentary written
in his own hand. The Kennicott Bible with
large two column illumination and Masoretic
text top and bottom rests in a room by itself,
and while the bible is static in its case, touch
screens hold the entire digitized text for
visitors to explore while there or at <http://
www.kennicottbible.org>.
This exhibit should be called the “beauty
of the page,” for each case holds examples
of the evolution and decoration of the text
replete with animals, people, and floral vines,
often in red and blue, or with geometric
designs. Carpet pages and full decorative
borders are displayed side by side with flowing texts. Not all the illustrations are secular:
motifs of “The Virgin and the Unicorn” in
a Hebrew Pentateuch confirms that Christian artists decorated Jewish manuscripts.
Christian images in a Book of Hours and a
Breviary share the same case, all representing the exchange of ideas between scholars,
artist, and book collectors.
To demonstrate that not all Hebrew manuscripts are of religious and philosophical
subjects, curators collected a four examples
of Kalila and Dimna in Arabic, Hebrew, and
Latin with and without illustrations: didactic
fables told by animals that take center stage.
Not to be outdone, the other side of the
case contains Euclid’s geometry in Arabic,
Hebrew, and Latin all open to the same
diagrams.
With rare exception limited to the oldest
examples, this exhibit explores the Hebrew
Codex written, and later printed, in various
hands and styles, decorated with motifs
similar to contemporary Christian and Muslim works, especially in Spain, Italy, and
Northern Europe. Visitors will remember
the winking gold, the magnificent illuminations, and charming microscopic calligraphy
and wonder if all books were decorated in
such luxurious fashion. While the emphasis
of this exhibition is on the exchange of
visual and textual ideas, the eye is drawn,
again and again, to the image, and not the
text, on the page.
Miriam Kahn
Kent State University, Ohio
Piet van Boxel and Sabine Arndt, eds. Crossing Borders: Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting-place of Cultures.
Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2010. 128p., ill. ISBN
9781851243136. US $50, £24.99.
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SHARP News, Vol. 22, No. 1 [2013], Art. 1
c Winter 2013
Open City: London, 1500–1700
Folger Shakespeare Library
Washington D.C.
5 June – 30 September 2012
All aspects of the authorship, publishing and reading practices of early modern
London are on display in this delightful and
stimulating exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. The term
“open city” is primarily used in the context of
an unstable moment in the transfer of power
following a military occupation, and the title
of this exhibition calls to mind Roberto Rossellini’s film Rome, Open City / Roma, città aperta
(1945), a powerful narrative of the Nazi occupation. Curators Kathleen Lynch and Betsy
Walsh may not have had this film in mind
when they conceived “Open City: London,”
but the sense of a city in transition is central
to this exhibition. Chronologically, the exhibition spans from the period of the London
of the Tudor kings to the expansion of empire around 1700. Through fourteen display
cases, numerous framed objects mounted on
the walls, and an optional audio guide, three
urban spaces are singled out in order to chart
the growth of London from medieval capital
to modern metropolis, from an economic,
political, and cultural center limited physically and conceptually to a large degree by
the ancient Roman walls to an “ever-opening
city.” These spaces are church, theater, and
market. Original rare manuscripts, deeds,
books, pamphlets, maps, and prints from the
collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library
tell the tale of Henry VIII’s break with Rome
and the confiscation of religious properties in
London, especially Blackfriars, where William
Shakespeare himself bought a house (most
likely as a real estate investment) in 1612. The
rise to prominence of the trade guilds and
their strong connection not only to London
markets but to individual parishes is also highlighted through the display of Hugh Alley’s
view of Cheapside from his manuscript A
Caveatt for the citty of London (1598), as well as
a focus on representations of trade company
shields, a parish pew chart, and Wenceslaus
Hollar’s etchings representing Sir Thomas
Gresham’s Royal Exchange, Byrsa Londinensis
(c. 1644), and his Winter (1643) from the fulllength series of seasons, depicting a mysterious masked woman strolling in Cheapside
before the Royal Exchange. Hollar’s long view
of London (1647), in fact, marks the halfway
point of the exhibition, and an opening up of
the city to bring attention to the theaters of
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SHARP News Vol. 22, no. 1
the south bank of the Thames, in particular
the Globe (Shakespeare’s The late and much
admired play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1609)
is on display here in case 8), the Cockpit in the
west, and the phenomenon of Bartholomew
Fair in the north (represented by Ben Jonson’s
play of the same name, performed in 1614
and published in 1631). In this second half
of the exhibition, the significance of plague
and fire in the city and its effect on urban
change are noted through the display of maps
and London bills of mortality, as well as the
increasing resort to public spectacle and even
graphic satire to express political and religious
dissent, seen in the wonderful engraving representing The Solemn and Mock Procession of the
Pope (1679/80). Here also I could not help but
notice some interesting cross-room dialogue
between display cases that was outside of
the exhibition’s chronology. Largely unintentional I suspect, but the second case, entitled
‘Changing Cityscape, Vanishing Monasteries’
and dealing with John Foxe, Henry VIII’s
dissolution of the monasteries, and Anglican versus papal conflict in general, makes a
suggestive diachronic comparison with case
thirteen and its treatment of religious toleration under the later Stuart monarchs. Reference is made here to struggles within English
Protestantism itself through the display of A
List of Conventicles (1683) and John Locke’s A
Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). The final
display case on London around 1700 makes
a point of extending the notion of open city
to imperial expansion, and smartly looks forward to some new institutions and spaces that
will come to be closely associated with the
eighteenth-century city: while we began with
the church, market, and theater, we end with
the London coffee-house, the novel as well as
the library, and the museum. Open City: London, 1500–1700 is a terrific exhibition which
successfully balances a number of different
audiences. It will be of interest to the audience
attending the plays and performances in the
Folger’s theater (playgoers would have been
consumers of much of the exhibition’s early
modern printed material originally), the many
tourists from the United States and abroad
who continually visit Washington, D.C., and
the multitude of national and international
scholars drawn to the city for its wealth of
archival collections.
Joseph Monteyne
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Magnificent Manuscripts:
Treasures of Book Illumination
from 780 through 1180
/ Pracht auf Pergament: Schätze
der Buchmalerei von 780 bis 1180
Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung Munich
19 October 2012 – 13 January 2013
Exhibiting rare books to a general audience is a challenging task. It is even harder
to put manuscripts on public display. Difficulties arise from the fact that these finely
crafted objects are best discovered in a way
that would allow visitors to an exhibition to
freely browse the books and take a look at
their extraordinary bindings. Though this is
not possible, the curators of the State Library
of Munich together with the colleagues at
the State Library of Bamberg have done a
tremendous job in putting together an exhibition of seventy-five manuscripts written
between 780 and 1180.
During the last decades, Munich’s Bayerische Staatsbibliothek has been recognized
by book historians for its rich holdings and
scholarly research, since library representatives have regularly presented smaller exhibitions on various topics. Now, with Magnificent
Manuscripts, the Munich state library exhibits
more than seventy of its most precious
holdings, along with three manuscripts from
the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, in order to
describe the history of book illumination in
Upper German monasteries. This history is
subdivided into the exhibition’s five thematic
fields, beginning with the manuscripts of the
Carolingian period, and the beginnings and
highlights of Ottonian manuscript production, which form the heart of the exhibition.
These parts are followed by the presentation
of continuity and smaller changes in the
manners of manuscript illumination in the
times of the emperors Otto III and Heinrich
II. The last part concentrates on the Romanesque period in Upper German manuscript
illumination that lasted during almost the
whole twelfth century.
Most of the manuscripts presented at the
exhibition entered the collections of these
two libraries during the secularization of
Bavarian monasteries in 1803. This event
almost immediately initiated manuscript
description and the cataloguing of rare book
holdings. As a result, nowadays we enjoy a
deep knowledge of the history and specialties
of these holdings.
The most interesting manuscripts come
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SHARP News Vol. 22, no. 1
from the tenth century, when reforms in
the monasteries led to an ever-growing need
for representational manuscripts to be used
in liturgical services. The Book of Gospels
became the one of the most produced books
in this period. Many of these gospel books
produced at the demand of high kings and
emperors at the monasteries of Freising and
Tegernsee are characterized by illuminations
with a high deployment of gold, be it for the
rather large initials or the backround of a
full-page illustration. A good example of this
is the Niederaltaich Book of Gospels (Evangeliar aus Niederalteich Clm 9476), which
shows the autonomous manuscript tradition
at Niederalteich. There are no parallels to the
title page. Here, Christ is standing on a grassy
knoll with his right hand raised in blessing. In
his left hand he is holding a book that can, according to Juliane Trede, be interpreted as the
Book of Gospels. The figure is framed with
portraits of the twelve apostles; this frame
forms a building that represents the church
with Jesus in the center and the apostles as its
founding walls. In its clarity, brightness and
the simple beauty of illuminations, this example and other manuscripts in the exhibition
clearly show why some of the manuscripts
kept in Munich and Bamberg deserve to be
called “magnificent.”
Many of the presented manuscripts have
contemporary bindings and book covers
that are not particularly eyecatching. There
are however, some unique and distinctive
bindings on display. The Uta-Codex (c.
1020–1025), named after abbess Uta of
Niedermünster, shows the Virgin Mary on
its golden front cover. The Virgin is raised
in three-dimensional relief at the center of
the cover. She sits on a throne with a square
carved emblem of the four Evangelists at
the corners. The outer frame has numerous
gems attached to it and makes this manuscript exceptional. Wardens at the exhibition
regularly turn the pages and show the binding of this and other books to the public, so
that the whole of the manuscript becomes
visible over time. Images from almost all of
the manuscripts on view have been digitized;
see < http://pracht-auf-pergament.digitalesammlungen.de/>.
It is remarkable that, even though exhibitions like this seek a general audience, the two
libraries involved with the conception of this
exhibition have chosen not to select only highlights of manuscript illumination for display,
but rather to focus on the development of
styles and illumination techniques as a whole.
Published by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst, 2013
Winter 2013 d It would have been possible to display the
Codex Aureus of St Emmeran (Clm 14000),
an East-Francian manuscript whose cover
is overwhelmingly encrusted with gems, or
the manuscripts with the Wessobrunn Prayer
(Clm 22053, III) one of the first manifestations of Old High German. The decision to
go beyond the most spectacular manuscripts
gives the public at large a chance to witness
the changes, small and large, in illuminations
that are normally only seen by a small community of experts.
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and Kunsthalle der
Hypo-Kulturstiftung, eds. Pracht auf Pergament:
Schätze der Buchmalerei von 780 bis 1180. Munich:
Hirmer Verlag, 2012. ISBN: 9783777453910.
344p., ill. €49.90.
Or by post to:
Dept of History, Politics and Philosophy,
Manchester Metropolitan University, Geoffrey Manton Building, Rosamund Street West,
Manchester M15 6LL
An annual fellowship is available to a
postgraduate scholar whose research falls
within the parameters of the conference
brief, and who wishes to present a paper at
the conference. The fellowship covers the
cost of attending the conference and some
costs of travel. A summary of the research
being undertaken accompanied by a letter of
recommendation from a tutor or supervisor
should be submitted by 31st January 2013
The papers presented will be considered
for publication; details to follow at the conference. Papers offered must be original work
and not delivered to any similar body before
presentation at this conference.
Call for Papers
Call for Nominations
Travel, Topography, and the
Book Trade
The Nominating Committee of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading
and Publishing seeks nominations for the
following offices for a two-year term, from
July 2013 to July 2015: [An asterisk means that
the incumbent is standing for re-election.]
The thirty-first Print Networks Conference
on the history of the British book trade will
take place at the University of Chichester
from 23-25 July 2013. Guest speakers include
Professor Bill Bell (Cardiff University) and
Anthony Payne (Anthony Payne Rare Books
& Manuscripts). Due to the proximity of the
conference venue to the south coast, Travel,
Topography and the Book Trade has been chosen
as the conference theme. The theme is broadly
defined, and any papers relating to the production, distribution and reception of texts and
images about travel, imagined and real, from
the Middle Ages to the modern era will be
considered. Papers on travelling and migrating
practitioners of the book trade, the physical
movement of texts and travelling printing
technology are also welcome. The geographical scope for the conference is Britain and the
Anglophone world. Papers should be of 30
minutes’ duration. An abstract of the offered
paper should be submitted (preferably via
email) by 31st January 2013 to:
President (must be a member of the Executive
Committee or Board of Directors)
Vice President
Treasurer*
Recording Secretary*
Membership Secretary*
External Affairs Director*
Director for Publications and Awards*
Director of Electronic Resources
Member-at-Large*
Nominating Committee (3)
Member, Board of Directors (5)
Jan Hillgartner
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
Print Networks Conference 2013
University of Chichester
23–25 July 2013
Catherine Armstrong
<[email protected]>
Under the constitution, no nominating petitions or signatures are necessary.Members
should also feel free to nominate themselves.
A list of current officers and directors is
available on the SHARP website, <http://
sharpweb.org>, where you will also find the
responsibilities of each post in the constitution. Nominations should be submitted to a
member of the nominations committee by
1 April 2013. These members are:
Carole Gerson <[email protected]>
Patrick Leary <[email protected]>
James Raven <[email protected]>.
5
SHARP News, Vol. 22, No. 1 [2013], Art. 1
c Winter 2013
Book Reviews
Darcy Cullen, ed. Editors, Scholars and the Social
Text. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2012. 281p. ISBN 9781442641044 (cloth):
US $65; ISBN 9781442610392 (paper): US
$27.95.
This series of collected essays, Editors,
Scholars and the Social Text, explores, defines,
and analyzes the social text, i.e. the “social
and technical circumstances of production”
as defined by D. F. McKenzie (9). Eleven essays cover the theoretical and practical editing
process from acquisition of manuscript to
layout, from visual elements and typography
to copy editing and ultimate presentation to
the reader. Ultimately, these essays peel back
the space between the manuscript and the
finished product, where the text takes on
its final shape before being presented to its
readers.
While scholar editors nurture critical, compiled, annotated texts of canonical authors,
academic editors shape books and articles
for academic presses and audiences. Their
conversation, by necessity, is lively and complex, as both foster works for a small, often
specialized readership. Following an introduction by Cullen, Shillingsburg’s essay recounts
early twentieth-century editorial projects led
by giants Houseman, McKerrow, Greg, and
Bowers which have morphed into valuable
digital bibliographic projects such as NINES
and the Blake Archive (41). With a bird’s-eye
view of past and present, Shillingsburg sets
the tone for the rest of essays.
Shipton, Einsohn, Hendel, Albert, and
Blakeley describe the conversation between
and among the author and editors as they
reshape and mold the text into a finished
product. Shipton explores collaborative relationships between author and editor, primarily
acquisitions editors. Einsohn’s essay examines
how copy editors smooth and polish the text,
while navigating word choices, style sheets,
and the flow of ideas. Project management is
an integral and complex part of this process
as outlined by Blakeley in her essay on the illustrated text, followed by Hendel and Albert
who discuss collaborative issues of design and
technology. These chapters explore the editorial process that appears, from the outside, to
omit the author from the conversation.
Theoretical essays by Mahon, Pettit, and
Young examine text and editing through
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SHARP News Vol. 22, no. 1
literary theory and the play of language as
conceived by authors, manipulated by editors, and received by readers. They examine
the existential interplay of language, image,
color, and design as authors experiment with
presentation of complex text and ideas.
Cowen’s penultimate essay homes in on
scholarly textual analysis and the place of
bibliographies and by extension bibliographic
study of physical and digital texts. Cullen’s
ultimate essay discusses the evolution of
digital books from static surrogates in PDF
to dynamic electronic texts with multiple
layers. These final essays resonate with Shillingsburg’s paper on the role of scholar
and academic editors as Cowen and Cullen
speculate about “what is a book” or text in
the digital era, challenging past and present
concepts of the field.
Cullen and the contributors to Editors,
Scholars and the Social Text take on the multidisciplinary fields of the study of the book
and textual analysis as they reveal the crucial
and multifaceted steps of editing texts prior
to delivery to the reader. Most importantly
readers of this collection are forced to wrestle
with the historic concept of the book and
consider how the dynamic text will evolve
and be studied over the next decade.
Miriam Kahn
Kent State University, Ohio
c
Archie L. Dick. The Hidden History of South
Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2012. xvi, 196p.,
ill. ISBN 9781442642898. US $55.
Book historian Archie L. Dick uses a
concept he calls “zones of influence” to
frame his work on The Hidden History of South
Africa’s Book and Reading Cultures. A “zone of
influence,” according to Dick, is any place
where institutions deploy De Certeausian
“strategies” of power to control information,
and where individuals and groups counter by
forging their own spaces through “tactics” of
re-reading and resistance. Each chapter of
The Hidden History examines, in chronological
order, interactions in different institutional
zones: slavery, literacy education, women’s
organizations, World War II service, libraries,
refugee settlements, prisons, and censorship.
Dick draws on a range of little-used and new
sources in English, Afrikaans, and Dutch
to trace official efforts at control and suppression and popular efforts to ignore them
entirely or at least work around them within
each of these zones. The result is a revelation of the reading practices of a tumultuous
multicultural, multilingual land of Christians
and Muslims over four centuries.
One of the most compelling zones was the
library with its variable commitment over time
to universal access to a broad range of reading
material. As women’s organizations became
active following the end of the South African
(Anglo-Boer) War in 1902, they helped create collections for white South Africans that
emphasized their own loyalties to either British or Dutch-Afrikaans politics and history.
During World War II librarians participated in
the Books for Troops program that provided
non-fiction and popular and literary fiction to
white and black soldiers in segregated settings,
inspiring many blacks to read but ultimately
failing to move post-war South Africa toward
greater equality. Damaging in this regard was
the influential right-wing apartheid supporter
Petrus Coetzee, who used his position in the
South African Library Association and as
head of the University of Pretoria library
to promote racial segregation, including in
matters related to reading. At the same time,
librarians stood by while the Commission
of Inquiry into Undesirable Publications in
the 1950s expanded book burning beyond
pornography and the subsequent Publications
Control Board in the 1960s censored “classic
works of literature, as well as books dealing
with politics and race issues” (95). Some
public libraries burned censored books, and
Dick includes a photograph of books being
thrown into a flaming furnace in Johannesburg in 1971 (96). In the segregated townships, books circulated in small libraries and
through the efforts of political clubs despite
the threat of surveillance and arrest. After
the Soweto Uprising in 1976, refugees used
libraries that included books that had been
banned in South Africa and that eventually
grew to include the kind of popular fare that
many readers wanted.
Illustrations throughout The Hidden History
augment the text, but the inclusion of a map
would have been helpful to readers outside
South Africa who might have trouble visualizing the locations of the various cities, townships, and villages discussed, and a more detailed back-of-the-book index would also have
been useful. But these are small criticisms
for a book that accomplishes much. Dick’s
work expands our understanding of South
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Africa’s print culture and provides a foundation for further in-depth research using the
same kinds of primary sources deployed so
expertly here such as oral history interviews,
institutional records, and photographs. Beyond that, The Hidden History offers a basis for
comparison with other nations where racism
infused the zones in which reading was both
strategy and tactic.
Cheryl Knott
University of Arizona
c
William Kirby. Le Chien d’or / The Golden
Dog, ed. Mary Jane Edwards. Montreal and
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press,
2012. clxxvi, 974p., ill. ISBN 9780773540309.
CAN $39.95.
The twelfth volume in the Centre for
Editing Early Canadian Texts series is a fully
edited version of William Kirby’s historical
romance, Le chien d’or, originally published in
1877 by Lovell, Adam, Wesson and Company.
It is edited by the director of the CEECT,
Mary Jane Edwards.
The text of the novel is preceded by a
detailed introduction laying out the various
editions of the work and its complicated
publishing and copyright history. A lengthy
section of explanatory notes is included at the
end, outlining various aspects of eighteenthcentury history, as well as identifying the
quotations and references found throughout
the novel. The work also includes a bibliographical description of the copy-text used
for this edition, and a list recording “material
taken from the 1877…impression of the first
edition…that replaces material that is either
missing or unrecoverable in the manuscript
copy-text” (903). As to be expected of a
work that deals with the history of Canada’s
French and English relations, the novel and
the introduction intertwine French and English throughout. The novel also quotes Latin
verses and French songs and expressions.
This is a very impressive work which
is difficult to review with any justice. The
amount of work that has gone into preparing
Kirby’s novel for publishing in the twenty-first
century is staggering. The novel has gone
through multiple editions, translations and
mutilations in its life. Thus CEECT used the
manuscript held by the Archives of Ontario
in the Kirby Collection to create a copy-text.
As the manuscript was often difficult to read
due to Kirby’s handwriting and composition
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Winter 2013 d practices, and because the manuscript was
damaged with missing and/or unreadable
portions, it was supplemented by the 1877
Lovell, Adam, and Wesson printed edition
of the book. Electronic copies of these two
copy-texts were then created and extensively
proof-read and compared to one another in
order to produce this definitive edition.
The strength of the CEECT edition lies
not only in its meticulous reconstruction of
the original text of the novel, but in its study
of the history of the book’s publication history, and the issues that arose from variant
copyright laws between the United States and
Canada. However, the novel itself is overly
long and fairly antiquated; a glossary and list
of characters would have been useful. The
volume is also physically difficult to read
and would benefit from being split into two
volumes: the introduction is 172 pages long
and the novel 755 pages, along with extensive
explanatory notes. The introduction is printed
in a very small typeface and there is no link between the text and the explanatory end-notes.
It is an excellent candidate for an e-reader text,
especially since existing electronic versions are
“unreliable” (cxxvi).
One is left wondering for whom this work
is intended. On the one hand it is a classic
Canadian historical novel that, despite its oldfashioned style, deserves to be rediscovered by
the average reader. However, the difficulties
outlined above, the bulk of the volume, and
the extensive scholarly work that has gone into
it means that it will most likely only appeal
to a bilingual scholarly audience interested in
William Kirby’s works, or in the history of
publishing and copyright in North America.
Renae Satterley
Middle Temple Library, London
c
Lesa Scholl. Translation, Authorship, and the
Victorian Professional Woman: Charlotte Brontë,
Harriet Martineau and George Eliot. Farnham,
UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 213p.,
ISBN 9781409426530. £55 / US $99.95.
This ambitious study by Lesa Scholl of the
University of Queensland sets out to explore
the role of translation in shaping the writings
and careers of three writers who drew on their
experiences of foreign language study and
travel to challenge the social space available
to middle-class women in nineteenth-cen-
tury England, thereby “transgress[ing] the
physical and ideological boundaries” that set
limits on their station in life. While the work
is largely informed by a literary perspective,
offering close readings of each writer’s novels
and other writings, it also explores how each
of the three women sought to engage with
the professional literary sphere by undertaking paraliterary activities such as editing
and reviewing, becoming entrepreneuses in the
“business of writing” (66) with a mastery of
foreign languages and cultures as their stock
in trade; this expertise in turn provided them
with a vantage point outside British culture
that opened up a route to intellectual and
economic emancipation.
The work is divided into three parts. The
first explores each writer’s engagement with
foreign language study as a means of achieving intellectual and social emancipation by
eventually surpassing, even inverting, the
master-pupil relationship, both within their
own lives and in their fiction: the study of
Jane Eyre is particularly convincing in this
light. The second part – likely to be of most
direct interest to book historians – focuses
on how the authors took on the role of
cross-cultural mediator through translation,
reviewing, and journalism, as part of their
strategies to develop a literary career in the
public sphere. Brontë’s presence in this section is less “tangible,” to borrow Scholl’s term
(76), than that of Martineau and Eliot. The
third part draws on the trope of the translator as traveller between cultures to study
how their experiences as travellers informed
their literary voices, both in their travel writing (Martineau and Eliot) and fiction (Eliot
and Brontë).
The book is informed by an overarching metaphor of translation as “not just
linguistic transmission, but an ambiguous,
problematic, and sometimes acrimonious
cultural exchange” (3). In Scholl’s usage, the
term encompasses a wide range of forms
of rewriting and cultural mediation, even
between cultures with a common language, as
in the discussion of Harriet Martineau’s travel
writing on America, which “translates [British] women’s need for emancipation through
the position of slavery in American culture”
(139). This broad-brush understanding of
the nature of translation, borrowed at least
in part from cultural theory (as references to
Homi Bhabha suggest), does not always sit
well with this Translation Studies purist, for
whom linguistic transfer is a fundamental
element of the translation process. While
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Martineau and Eliot were unquestionably
influential figures in nineteenth-century British translation for their work on Comte and
Strauss respectively, the inclusion of Brontë
on the grounds of her experience in Brussels,
during which time she studied and wrote in
French, seems at times somewhat tenuous.
The author seems to be aware of the potentially questionable nature of Brontë’s place in
the triad of authors, writing “the inclusion of
Charlotte Brontë in this study is not as obvious in comparison to the resonance between
Martineau and Eliot” (8). In this light, I wonder whether a more general category of “the
foreign” might have been a more judicious
choice of conceptual framework.
This quibble aside, Scholl’s work is a
valuable addition to the sum of knowledge
on female authorship and how it reflected
– and indeed impacted – the place of women
in nineteenth-century British society. It is
particularly fruitful in placing this relatively
familiar ground within the context of what
has been called the “translation turn” in cultural studies, reflecting growing recognition
of the fact that the modern nation-state is
not necessarily the optimum unit of research
when it comes to studying cultural trends. In
this sense, Scholl’s work, which underlines
the significance of imported French and
German philosophy in causing “fissures of
faith, understanding, and cultural stability”
in nineteenth-century Britain, is a timely reminder to book historians of the importance
of our own “transnational turn.”
Susan Pickford
Université Paris 13
c
A. R.Venkatachalapathy. The Province of the
Book: Scholars, Scribes and Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu. New Delhi: Permanent Black,
2012. 292p. ISBN 9788178243313. Rs. 795.
This is a beautifully produced book, as
befits its subject matter, which is printing,
publishing and reading practices in modern
colonial Tamilnadu; in short, the domain of
the Tamil book. The introduction makes a
tantalizing promise about revealing the complex intersections of technology, missionary
enterprise – both Christian and Hindu – and
middle class reading habits to remind us that
the book was as much the end output of
technology (print) as it was a cultural practice.
Venkatachalapathy then follows this up by
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giving us a smart tally of the questions that
he wishes to address in this book: namely, the
constituent elements of patronage for publishing in late nineteenth-century Tamilnadu,
the cultural forms of publishing, when and
how the “institutions of author, publisher
and printer” emerged and the importance
of the colonial state in articulating a modern
print culture.
One can hardly dispute the significance
of these questions, especially in the context
of what we know about Tamil language
politics of the twentieth century and the key
role that Tamil played in political mobilization and identity politics. It is here that the
book disappoints, for the author makes no
effort whatsoever to connect his immediate
research on the trajectory of Tamil book
history (rich in empirical detail) with a larger
story of social and political transformation
involving the speakers and consumers of the
language. Equally disquieting is the somewhat
unproblematic treatment of both pre-colonial
and colonial regimes including princely states,
the hollow crowns, and the not so hollow
religious establishments like the mathas where
there was a robust engagement with language,
philosophy, and religion. We do know from
important sociological research that leadership and sources of legitimacy in the mathas
began to shift and that this corresponded
with the assertion of new high castes just as
princely establishments like Ramnad began to
invest more singularly in the development of
Tamil. How these intersected with the world
of publishing and printing is something that
is obscure in the author’s narrative. In fact,
statements about the miserable tastes of the
ruler of Ettayapuram, of how the implications of princely patronage had always to do
with indulging in sycophancy and in sharing
pleasure in poor and bawdy poetry, seem
strangely out of context when the author
is in fact trying to tease out the dynamics
of transition between the early modern and
the colonial modern in Tamil society. While
one must appreciate the author’s strategy of
tracking the history of changing patronage
contexts through the snapshots of poets and
scribes (see the chapter on Bharati especially)
the canvas is far too vague to help the general
reader to join the dots and make sense of
the narrative.
The formulations are straightforward
enough. Printing initially developed by
Christian missionaries did not find a huge
or fertile field immediately. Even as some
establishments connected with literary
production and publication of manuscripts
expanded their operations, the modern world
of printing and publishing with its principal
agents, namely printer, publisher, and author
working in tandem, did not emerge until late
into the nineteenth century. The shift from
gentry patronage to a modern publics where
a robust middle class began to read and write
the domesticated novel was a major milestone
and promoted by a network of likeminded
agents. There is an interesting analysis of
the novelist’s subordinate position in the
publishing world; the trope of the penurious
novelist was borne out by actual life experience. Textbook writers seem to have enjoyed
greater influence; it would have been useful
for us to know how the government regulated
the text book trade, if it did at all, through
its various committees of public instruction.
Some discussion of other states, especially
Bengal, could have been useful in making a
contrast or a comparison. While the author
does refer to the intersections between high
literature and that of Grub Street in the case
of battala literature in Bengal, he does not
draw out significant conclusions in terms of
the close relationship between text, image
and performance. How was pulp fiction, for
instance, represented in early film? What kind
of traffic actually happened between the two
worlds of fiction? These are some questions
that the book could have taken up more
imaginatively. It is possible that the range of
materials for understanding the province of
the book in Tamilnadu is limited, and hence
the questions remain more or less circular
and self-evident.
Lakshmi Subramanian
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
c
Sarah Wadsworth and Wayne A. Wiegand.
Right Here I See My Own Books: The Woman’s
Building Library at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Amherst and Boston: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2012. xvii, 284p. ISBN
9781558499287. US $28.95.
Sarah Wadsworth, a literary scholar, and
Wayne Wiegand, a library historian, joined
forces to recount the inception and organization of the Woman’s Building and its library
of over 7,000 items at the 1893 World’s Fair
in Chicago. Chapters deal with the question
of whether women’s contributions would
be incorporated throughout the Fair or
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SHARP News Vol. 22, no. 1
segregated in a dedicated women’s building;
the remarkable manner in which the Board
of Lady Managers enlisted dozens of state
delegations and women’s clubs throughout
the country and in several foreign countries
to compile the largest collection of women’s
literature to date; the enormously influential
role of the delegation from New York State,
which contributed over 2,000 items; and the
“Grand Opening” which describes the public’s amazement at the vast library of writings
by women.
The heart of the book and perhaps the
most interesting section is three chapters that
analyze the contents of the library, including
the writings of the “Columbian Women” as
a type of genre; the presence (and absence)
of writings by and about African American
and native American women; and works that
reflected a regional tendency. Wadsworth and
Wiegand mention dozens of authors and
titles while analyzing nine novels in particular. Not surprisingly, the largest subject area
of writing was fiction, followed respectively
by history/geography/biography, religion,
education, sociology (including works about
marriage and women and work), and science,
as well as the full gamut of other subjects. The
authors conclude that the separatist strategy
of the Woman’s Building spotlighted the
achievements of women, while the library,
with its “anti-canonical inclusiveness that
validated the work of thousands of littleknown women writers, conveyed a powerful message to the women who visited the
library” (213).
The history of the Fair, the creation of
the Woman’s Building, the work of the Lady
Managers, and the library itself progressed
despite a variety of inherent tensions that
this book clarifies. Class dichotomies are suggested by the composition of the Board of
Lady Managers, which included upper class
socialites like Bertha Palmer and middle class
club women or business women. Although
they championed the rights of working
women, none of the latter were represented
among the 117 members of the Board. The
authors also describe the conflict between the
so-called “Isabellas” who favored female suffrage and the philanthropists who were more
interested in promoting women’s welfare.
While reflecting impulses of the so-called
“New Woman” and defending economic and
educational rights of women, the Fair organizers also favored woman’s traditional role of
domesticity as the pinnacle of her achievement. Similarly, while proclaiming inclusivity,
Winter 2013 d the Fair women with certain notable exceptions (particularly the New York delegation)
neglected to involve African American, native
American, and working class women.
Another source of tension arose with the
seemingly mundane question of organizing
the library. Because the New York delegation
provided by far the largest number of items
sent to the library, they successfully maneuvered to secure a geographical arrangement.
The Lady Managers would have preferred a
subject arrangement that displayed the full
diversity of topics while minimizing sectional
divisions. The intended subject list of the
books was never published, but Wadsworth
has done a great service in converting the
shelflist laboriously compiled in 1893 by
librarian Edith Clarke into a database freely accessible at <epublications.marquette.edu>.
Wadsworth and Wiegand draw extensively
from archival sources to employ the words
of the participants themselves, but the early
chapters read more like a chronology interspersed with quotations. A bibliography of
works selected from the fifty-two pages of
notes would have been useful, and quite apart
from this work so would be a bibliography
on the role of women in the world’s fairs in
general.
This book will interest historians of women’s literature, of libraries and librarianship,
and of the leadership role of women in late
nineteenth-century America. Combined with
the observations of the participants captured
in Art and Handicraft in the Woman’s Building of
the World’s Columbian Exposition (1894), the
vivid descriptions in The Fair Women (1982),
and the evaluations of the library and its contents in the special issue of Libraries & Culture
(41.1 Winter 2006), Right Here I See My Own
Books conveys a remarkably complete picture
of the inspiration, organization, completion,
and impact of this historic library.
Laura Fuderer
University of Notre Dame, Indiana
c
Hilary E. Wyss. English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary
Schools, 1750–1830. Philadelphia; University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2012. xii, 251p., ill. ISBN
9789780812244137. US $59.95.
Hilary Wyss’ study focuses very closely
on a limited set of writings related to New
England-based boarding schools for Native
Americans during the century 1740–1840, a
period in which education – for both white
and Native students – consisted chiefly of
regimented memorization. Such an approach
substituted European alphabet-based literacy for the “sign systems” (22) of Native
tradition. In this context the Indian schools
were “radical experiments in cross-cultural
communications” (4), training the students
in ways foreign to generations of their own
culture. Wyss’ approach is based on the concept of “readerly” and “writerly” Indians:
the “readers” were taught reading, religion,
and basic work skills, with emphasis upon
Protestant values of “order, education and
obedience” (21) – an approach and curriculum similar to that of the charity schools of
the time. The “writers,” usually the best male
students, were taught writing (considered a
higher skill in the eighteenth century) and
a more advanced academic curriculum, not
far removed from that taught at the white
grammar schools. “Writerly” students were
expected to advance into careers as teachers,
clergymen, and missionaries. The final end of
both types of education was to mold the Native American children into good citizens, of
use to their own people – as the missionaries
conceived of such usefulness.
Wyss has investigated closely the work of
several writers, beginning with a consideration of the “Annual Reports” of Eleazer
Wheelock, the founder of one of the first
boarding schools for Indian youth; Wheelock’s accounts of his institution (which
became Dartmouth College) were directed
at donors, who responded generously to appeals for support of an enterprise that made
Indian youth into docile workers, “the grateful beneficiaries of English generosity” (42).
The main focus of Wyss’ study, however, is
directed toward the writings of Native teachers and students of the schools, including
Samuel Hopkins’ memoirs (published in
1753) of his service as a teacher at a boarding school in Stockbridge, Massachusetts;
Joseph Johnson’s account of his service as
a teacher among the Oneidas in 1766–68;
the commonplace book of John Ridge, a
Cherokee student at the Foreign Mission
School in Cornwall, Connecticut; and several
publications from the Brainerd Mission in
Tennessee, including The Little Osage Captive,
The Memoirs of Catharine Brown, and the writings of David Brown and John Arch.
The schools described in this study seem
to have provided only rudimentary education, and they had no long-term institutional
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success, but some of the students were able
to use what they learned there to serve the
needs of their people. Wyss concludes that
these authors were in fact rather sophisticated in turning their writings to their own
purposes, beginning with the use of family
correspondence to maintain Native cultural
networks. Although some of her observations seem somewhat speculative, she clearly
makes her case that Native Americans were
often able to become readers and writers
and to use these skills successfully for their
own purposes. Her account of the Cherokee
schools is particularly interesting, touching on
the complicated entanglements of the missionaries and their students in the Cherokees’
developing literacy both in English and in the
Cherokee syllabary, as well as in the political
factionalism and social hierarchy within the
Cherokee community. This book is a useful
contribution to the history of education and
literacy as well as the human dimension of
the complex intermingling of two very different cultures.
Nancy B. DuPree
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
In Short
Philip Hensher. The Missing Ink. The Lost Art
of Handwriting. New York: Faber and Faber,
2012. 270p. ill. ISBN: 978-0-86547-893-0.
$26.00.
Handwriting is on its deathbed. Students
no longer turn in handwritten essays; their
professors are unable to pen their corrections
in the appropriate red ink. Fountain pens
are the domain of antiquaries and slightly
mad collectors. Even the bic – eulogized by
Hensher – is used only for throw-away notes,
and itself then disappears. Handwriting needs
a memorial, and Hensher lovingly provides
one. He gives us a history of the more recent
efforts to standardize writing hands, including
even the italic revival (which he despises). He
spends much time debunking graphology.
Perhaps more interestingly, he traces the part
script plays in Dickens’s writings and Proust’s
novel and letters. Amidst much else, there is
a chapter on the desperate search in London
for a fountain pen with an italic nib and the
proper ink reservoir. Enjoy!
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/sharp_news/vol22/iss1/1
E-Resource Reviews
Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. The
Life and Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. <http://www.
eapoe.org>.
The Life and Writings of Edgar Allan Poe lists
the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore as
its primary author. While this claim is motivated by a generous desire to share the credit
for this site, almost the entirety of The Life
and Writings of Edgar Allan Poe is the product
of a staggering amount of labor by a single
author, Jeffrey Savoye. Mr. Savoye, an independent scholar, is the Secretary/Treasurer
of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore
and has published extensively on Poe. Most
recently he is the co-editor, along with Burton
Pollin, of The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan
Poe, 2 vols. (Gordian, 2008).
As stated in the site’s “Brief History of
the Poe Society,” the purpose of The Life
and Writings of Edgar Allan Poe is “providing
information about Poe” to as wide an audience as possible. In pursuit of this goal, the
site is an unqualified success. In addition to
multiple texts of all Poe’s tales, poems, essays,
and letters, the site contains a wealth of basic
information regarding Poe’s life, appearance,
and answers to commonly asked questions
about the author (e.g. Poe’s death, Poe and
drugs). The site is updated on a regular basis
and recent major additions to the site include
the entirety of Arthur Hobson Quinn’s 1941
Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography.
Like the other major online literary archives to which it invites comparison – The
Walt Whitman Archive and Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and American Culture – The Life and Writings of
Edgar Allan Poe provides its visitors with free,
web-based access to a repository of texts,
images, and bibliographic resources central
to the study of a major figure of American
literature. Not only I, but numerous of my
colleagues have reported using the site on a
regular basis, particularly as a source for teaching rarely anthologized essays such as “Some
Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House”
(1845) or “Anastatic Printing” (1845).
Unfortunately, the comprehensiveness
of the site’s textual offerings is not matched
by a reciprocal use of clear, consistent, and
comprehensive site-information tags. To use
a well-known Poe tale, the site’s page for
the American Museum’s 1838 text of “Ligeia”
includes only two pieces of metadata: a keyword tag, “Ligeia, by Edgar Allan Poe, Tales,
Fiction, Short Stories,” and a description tag,
“Ligeia, by Edgar Allan Poe.” This metadata
is the same for all 6 versions of “Ligeia”
regardless of date or place of publication.
In contrast, the metadata for parts I & II of
the Evening Mirror texts of “Pay of Authors
in America” includes the date of publication, “Evening Mirror,” and several variant
spellings of Poe’s name. This inconsistency
seems to be the result of the site’s being built
by a single author working by himself over
a considerable length of time to transcribe
the entirety of the Poe corpus into html
format.
The absence of robust, consistently applied metadata is, in turn, aggravated by the
absence of a search engine within the site.
Users desiring to search the site are directed
to use the advance search features on Google
to perform a web search while restricting the
domains searched to <http://www.eapoe.
org>.
In contrast to the site’s under-developed
metadata and search features, The Life and
Writings of Edgar Allan Poe scrupulously acknowledges all debts to previous scholars. All
of the essays included in the site uniformly
provide proper parenthetical citations to all
quotations taken from the works of other
scholars and conclude with full citations for
all works referenced. On occasions where the
most recent update to a text or essay is not
listed at the bottom of the text, it is always
included in the page’s metadata.
On the whole, The Life and Writings of Edgar
Allan Poe is a comprehensive, conscientiously
researched archive which is most useful for
scholars already familiar with Poe and the
community of scholars surrounding his texts.
If you are looking for a specific tale or letter, it
is easy to tunnel through the site’s well-organized hierarchical structure to find what you
need in short order. For the user who is new
to Poe, the lack of robust metadata and search
features will present challenges to exploring
the wealth of materials brought together by
this essential resource dedicated to one of the
nations’ most popular authors.
Les Harrison
Virginia Commonwealth University
10
et al.: Volume 22, Number 1
SHARP News Vol. 22, no. 1
Laura Mandell, et al. 18thConnect. Miami University, Ohio. <http://www.18thConnect.
org>.
18thConnect is an intuitively designed
electronic resource by pioneering digital
humanities scholar Laura Mandell of Miami
University. The resource has diverse institutional and technological origins: a video on
the site, titled “Introduction to 18thConnect,”
states, “18thConnect is sponsored by groups at
UVA, Northwestern University, Illinois, and
Michigan, but its home is Miami University.”
The resource’s steering committee includes
a host of prominent eighteenth-century
scholars and book historians, primarily from
the University of Virginia, but also from the
Universities of Glasgow, Herefordshire, and
Sheffield, as well as the National University
of Ireland, Galway. Adding to the mix, the
research and development team is headquartered at Texas A&M University, though
project managers from the University of
Illinois provide expertise. The resource’s
technological wing has garnered funding
from both the Mellon Foundation and the
National Endowment for Humanities.
18thConnect stands poised to alter the
field of eighteenth-century studies. Not only
does it allow scholars to locate, annotate,
and curate eighteenth-century primary texts
in innovative ways, it provides social media
functions that enable new modalities for
discussion, exchange, and even pedagogy.
It is worth noting that the site intentionally
mirrors the admirable mission statement
and technical infrastructure of another,
more established resource, Jerome McGann
Winter 2013 d 11
and Andrew Stauffer’s NINES (Networked
Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic
Scholarship), which is also designed to facilitate
interaction between the past’s textual archives
and the present’s emerging forms of digital
research. And like NINES, 18thConnect is interested in being a clearinghouse for digital
peer-reviewed projects.
The most basic function of 18thConnect is
locating primary and secondary texts, and it
does this through a robust search mechanism
that consults numerous digital databases. For
instance, one can do full-text Boolean searches
in Gale’s Eighteenth-Century Collections Online
(ECCO) while also searching the Library of
Congress’s online collections. So, too, can
one search digital resources that include but
are not limited to Eighteenth Century Journals,
Victorian Popular Culture, and the Digital Library
of the Caribbean, alongside a small but growing
number of online secondary texts, primarily
those associated with Romantic Circles. In short,
18thConnect offers one-stop shopping for a
variety of materials and will likely offer more
in the future. Of course, this is not to say that
it remediates all problems of access. If one is
not affiliated with a library that subscribes to
ECCO, or if one needs to consult a work not
represented among ECCO’s roughly 182,000
digital texts, the search defaults to listings from
English Short Title Catalogue (400,000 titles).
Still, this failsafe to the ESTC is useful because
it indicates the wealth of texts still undigitized
texts while also indicating where these material
texts can be found.
Beyond just locating texts or references,
a free and easily obtained user account allows scholars to act on texts and references
by building and annotating individualized
archives. In social terms, users can organize
text objects into themed exhibits that can
be shared with other members. Indeed, the
process of organizing objects into exhibits
can lead to profound insights; as Mandell
points out in her introductory video, the term
“circumstantial evidence” takes on an unconventional meaning within the context of all
accessible eighteenth-century texts. Finally,
users can take advantage of the classroom
function to establish a virtual pedagogic
space wherein registered students can access
and annotate specific exhibits.
The most interesting and potentially
groundbreaking part of 18thConnect is an integrated module called TypeWright. TypeWright
invites scholars to check manipulable text
versions of works against the photographic
scans of their originals. Essentially the goal
is to confirm that OCR (optical character
recognition) software has produced a correct,
digitally searchable text. Currently, 117,000
texts are enabled for TypeWright editing, and
though this is a meticulous process that
involves verifying texts line-by-line, it can
be rewarding, especially for book history
specialists. It is a massive undertaking to edit
OCR-generated lines like “nane sdiaribua”
into more legible forms like “nunc saliaribus”
(part of the Horatian epigraph to a 1792
poem,“Airdrie Fair”). Thankfully, 18thConnect
has provided the technological framework
for this kind of crowd-sourced participation
in digital preservation, even to the point of
suggesting that a future partnership with Gale
may incentivize editorial work by granting
participants the rights to edited versions so
... / 12
Begin your membership in SHARP, and you will receive the annual Book History, SHARP News, and the SHARP Membership and Periodicals Directory, which is published each summer. Students and unwaged can opt for a rate that does not include a subscription to Book History. We accept Visa, MasterCard or cheques in American currency, made out to
SHARP. Please send this form to The Johns Hopkins University Press, Journals Publishing Division, PO Box 19966, Baltimore, MD 21211-0966 USA.
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22.1
Published by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst, 2013
11
SHARP News, Vol. 22, No. 1 [2013], Art. 1
12 c Winter 2013
SHARP News Vol. 22, no. 1
... / 11
they can later be expanded into digital or print
scholarly editions.
While today 18thConnect appears hindered
by its small number of users, its unique capabilities merit attention and participation from
scholars, if only because no other site offers
such a wealth of searching, research, social,
and participatory functions.
Daniel DeWispelare
George Washington University
Bibliography
General
Benito Rial Costas. Print Culture and Peripheries in Early Modern Europe: A Contribution
to the History of Printing and the Book Trade
in Small European and Spanish Cities. Leiden,
NL and and Boston, MA: Brill, 2012. ISBN
9789004235748.
Sylvie Ducas, ed. Les Acteurs du Livre. Paris:
N. Malais, 2012. ISBN 9782952678278.
Philip Hensher. The Missing Ink: The Lost Art
of Handwriting. London and New York: Faber
and Faber, 2012. ISBN 9780865478930.
John A. Lane. The Diaspora of Armenian
Printing: 1512–2012, trans. Anna Maria Martirosjan-Mattaar. Amsterdam, NL: University of Amsterdam and Ministry of Culture
of the Republic of Armenia, 2012. ISBN
9081926403.
Jiabo Liu. Copyright Industries and the Impact of Creative Destruction: Copyright Expansion and the Publishing Industry. Abingdon,
UK; New York: Routledge, 2013. ISBN
9780415523882.
Mathieu Lommen. Het Boek van het Gedrukte Boek een Visuele Geschiedenis Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2012. ISBN
9789081489232.
Martyn Lyons. The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, 1860–1920. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012. ISBN
9781107018891.
Irena Makaryk and Marissa McHugh, eds.
Shakespeare and the Second World War: Memory,
Culture, Identity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. ISBN 1442644028.
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/sharp_news/vol22/iss1/1
Gilles Polizzi and Anne Réach-Ngô, eds.
Le Livre, Produit Culturel: Politiques Éditoriales,
Stratégies de Librairie et Mutations de L’Objet
de L’Invention de L’Imprimé à la Révolution
Numérique. Paris: L’Harmattan-Orizons, 2012.
ISBN 9782296088191.
Australia
Eileen Chanin, Book Life: The Life and Times
of David Scott Mitchell. New Castle, DE: Oak
Knoll Press, 2012. ISBN 9781584563075.
Azerbaijan
Afaq Äliyeva. Cälil Mämmädquluzadäirsinin näşri mäsäläläri. Baky, Azerbaijan: Elm vä
Tähsil, 2012. No ISBN.
Bulgaria
Rosen Petkov. Za Starite Knigi i Kompiutŭrnite
Izkustva. Sofia, Bulgaria: SOKI, 2012. ISBN
9789549231168.
China
Yuming He. Home and the World: Editing the
“Glorious Ming” in Woodblock-Printed Books of the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. ISBN
9780674066809.
France
Kay Amert. The Scythe and the Rabbit:
Simon de Colines and the Culture of the Book in
Renaissance Paris. Rochester, ed. Robert Bringhurst. New York: RIT Press, 2012. ISBN
1933360569.
Raymond Birn. Royal Censorship of Books
in Eighteenth-Century France. Palo Alto, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2012. ISBN
0804763593.
Germany
Heinz Börner. Im Leseland: Die Geschichte
des Volksbuchhandels. Berlin: Das Neue Berlin,
2012. ISBN 9783360021342.
Japan
Atsushi Isobe. Shuppan bunka no Meiji zenki:
Tōkyō Haishi Shuppansha to sono shūhen. Tokyo:
Perikansha, 2012. ISBN 9784831513151.
Netherlands
Feike Dietz. Literaire Levensaders: Internationale Uitwisseling van Woord, Beeld en Religie in de
Republiek. Hilversum: Verloren, 2012. ISBN
9789087042806.
South Africa
Andrew van der Vlies. Print, Text and Book
Cultures in South Africa. Johannesburg, SA:
Witwatersrand University Press, 2012. ISBN
1868145662.
South Korea
Chi-yŏng Hwang. Myong-Ch’ong ch’ulp’an kwa
Choson chonp’a. Soul-t’ukpyolsi, South Korea:
Sigan ui Mulle, 2012. ISBN 9788965110323.
Chong-il Ko. Han’guk ch’ulp’an 100-yon
ul ch’ajaso. Seoul: Chongumsa, 2012. ISBN
9788996762706.
Spain
Clara Palmiste. L’Organisation du Commerce
du Livre à Séville au XVIIIe siècle (1680–1755):
Imprimeurs, Libraire et Marchands de Livres Espagnols et Étrangers à Sevilla. Paris: Publibook
Editions 2012. ISBN 9782748382426.
United Kingdom
Sara K. Barker and Brenda Hosington,
eds. Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation,
Print and Culture in Britain, 1473–1640. Leiden,
NL and and Boston, MA: Brill, 2012. ISBN
9789004241848.
David Hopkins and Charles Martindale,
eds. The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2012. ISBN
9780199219810.
Julia Jones. Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory: The Working Life of Herbert Allingham.
Pleshey, UK: Golden Duck, 2012. ISBN
1899262075.
United States
Alexandra Socarides. Dickinson Unbound:
Paper, Process, Poetics. Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2012. ISBN
9780199858088.
Richard J. Wolfe. Jacob Bigelow’s American
Medical Botany, 1817–1821: An Examination
of the Origin, Printing, Binding, and Distribution
of America’s First Color Plate Book: with Special
Emphasis on the Manner of Making and Printing
its Colored Plates. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll
Press, 2012. ISBN 9781584563037.
12